Entrepreneurship is often driven by the same urge for accumulation that shapes human life from childhood-chasing bigger numbers, status, and validation without self-understanding. This leads to hollow pursuits where profit replaces purpose. True fulfillment arises not from external success, but from inner clarity. When one understands oneself, work becomes meaningful, and money shifts from being the goal to merely a tool.
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Questioner: Acharya Ji, welcome to IIT Roorkee. We are currently at the E-Summit, surrounded by thousands of young minds who are being told entrepreneurship is the ultimate path to freedom, impact, and success.
In our textbooks and our screens, an entrepreneur is portrayed as a problem solver, someone who looks at the world, finds a form, and builds a company to fix it. But looking at your journey, moving from the heights of IIT and IIM to a life dedicated to the self, you've often hinted that doing is usually a mask for being.
I want to ask you: beyond the pitches, the funding rounds, and the innovation, what does it actually mean to be an entrepreneur in the truest sense of the word? Is it a journey of the ego trying to leave a dent in the universe, or is it a process of a person finally finding a work that is so right that they no longer need the world's validation? What is the self of an entrepreneur actually seeking?
Acharya Prashant: It depends on the entrepreneur. They come from all ends of the spectrum. It totally depends on the person who is starting out. Most of it is for the sake of making profits. That end, that goal, is fixed first, taken as a certainty, taken as an axiom, and then the typical entrepreneur reverse-engineers his way from that already determined, already imagined destination. The destination, almost always, is money. Simply money, more money. One cannot make as much money in a job as one can make as owner of a company, especially if one manages to sell that company off. That is usually the motive.
